BALLET
Misdeal
JOHN CR kNKO has always had a gift for comic choreography and at his best—in Pineapple Poll, Bonne Bouche or the blissful sequence with a wandeling table in Sweeney Todd—he has been wittily inventive. How, then, to ex- plain why his Card Game, given its London premiere lait 'week, abounds in coarse laughs but too link wit? Maybe because the work was originally staged for his Stuttgart audience, who enjoyed its deliberate humour, or because he has taken Strh■insky's ironic nods at Ravel and Rossini 'as licence for a monster send-up of dance conventions. Whatever the reasons, Card Game is a diSappointment.
The initial idea of a Joker lousing up three poker deals is fine, but Cranko's realisation of it involves him -in two gags that do not run well together in harness. The first is the anti-feminist one of turning his two leading ladies into clowns, and then taking it several steps further by having the Joker frisk about in rudimentary drag, giving a blustery impersonation of a ballerina. The second, and more stylish, one is the joke of movement taken to its illogical conclusion, one of the nicer enfants du parody; the pity is that Cranko does not make more of it.
At its weakest—in the two outside movements —the ballet is little more than a jolly burlesque; in the first deal Annette Page is the odd woman out to two pairs, playing with a wonderful finesse and an air of delicate how-the-hell-did-I-get-into- this-mess alarm as she is lifted, turned, rejected and generally tempest-tossed by four men. In the third deal Lynn Seymour is equally funny as a poor little two of diamonds who is ruining a beautiful royal flush in spades. Looking ravish- ingly tousled, lusciously pretty in her confusion, she brings off a splendid characterisation, but the role is a dreadful waste of her talents. Centre of durlesque is the Joker, here made an im- pudent, anarchic droll, and though the choreo- graphy does not sit easily on Christopher Gable's style, he has a whale of a time in the last scene impersonating the queen of spades, turning her into a rachitic old queen of the dance, complete with 'gems from the classics' quotations.
As a filling to this sandwich there is a layer of fine choreography in the second deal, a set of admirable variations for five men as a flush in hearts who resist the Joker's intrusions (I like to think it is because they are shocked by his vile costume). Here the choreography is elegant, strong, witty, well shaped on five excellent soloists, and it suggests just what the ballet could have been had Crank° not slipped on the artistic banana-skin of farcical humour.
CLEMENT CRISP
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